Description

“The Portrait of a Lady is [Henry] James's first fully exposed case of human manipulation;” William H. Gass has written, “of what it means to be a consumer of persons, and of what it means to be a person consumed.” Harold Bloom has described the novel as James’s portrait of himself as a woman, and I suppose that’s more or less the case with “Hidden” in which I identify directly with its heroine Mariyam Henze, the middle-aged, Muslim journalist and poetess who is both self-created and heavily inspired by Oriana Fallaci, to whom the work is also dedicated. Henze is the young, American Isabel Archer of James’s portrait translated for effect and humorously confronted by an imagined ‘twin’ who ominously reminds Mariyam of her age, her faults, and likewise of the past. Ali Allawi has written of the difficulties of potential European converts to Islam in seeing the faith standing separate from “the prejudices and social baggage of Islamic lands.” Henze is such person, rather specifically a European Muslim who returns to the faith with a kind of Europeaness which, in her eyes and mind, stands separate from the social prejudices of itself. The result is a panorama of moods and locations; the portrait of a woman whose life is, somewhere in spirit, very much my own.